a bag of old Virginia tobacco, free from any flavor than its own, and filling the pipe, I asked him for a light in the best phrase-book Norsk I could command. He gave it, and I placed the bag in his hand and motioned him to fill his pipe. When that was done I handed the pouch to another, and motioned him to fill and pass the tobacco around. One by one they took it, and I saw that I had friends. No man can fill his pipe from another’s bag and not wish him well. “Does any of you know Olaf of the Mountain?” I asked. I saw at once that I had made an impression. The mention of that name was evidently a claim to consideration. There was a general murmur of surprise, and the group gathered around me. A half-dozen spoke at once. “He was at L---- last week,” they said, as if that fact was an item of extensive interest. “I want to go there,” I said, and then was, somehow, immediately conscious that I had made a mistake. Looks were exchanged and some words were spoken among my friends, as if they were oblivious of my presence. “You cannot go there. None goes there but at night,” said one, suggestively. “Who goes over the mountain comes no more,” said another, as if he quoted a proverb, at which there was a faint intimation of laughter on the part of several. My first adviser undertook a long explanation, but though he labored faithfully I could make out no more than that it was something about “Elsket” and “the Devil’s Ledge,” and men who had disappeared. This was a new revelation. What object had my friend? He had never said a word of this. Indeed, he had, I now remembered, said very little at all about the people. He had exhausted his eloquence on the fish. I recalled his words when I asked him about Elsket: “She is a daughter of the Vikings, poor thing.” That was all. Had he been up to a practical joke? If so, it seemed rather a sorry one to me just then. But anyhow I could not draw back now. I could never face him again if I did not go on, and what was more serious, I could never face myself. I was weak enough to have a thought that, after all, the mysterious Olaf might not come; but the recollection of the fish of which my friend had spoken as if they had been the golden fish of the “Arabian Nights,” banished that. I asked about the streams around L----. “Yes, there was good fishing.” But they were all too anxious to tell me about the danger of going over the mountain to give much thought to the fishing. “No one without Olafs blood could cross the Devil’s Ledge.” “Two men had disappeared three years ago.” “A man had disappeared there last year. He had gone, and had never been heard of afterward. The Devil’s Ledge was a bad pass.” “Why don’t they look into the matter?” I asked. The reply was as near a shrug of the shoulders as a Norseman can accomplish. “It was not easy to get the proof; the mountain was very dangerous, the glacier very slippery; there were no witnesses,” etc. “Olaf of the Mountain was not a man to trouble.”